


Blue Sky

by quigonejinn



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, Femdom, M/M, Mild Kink, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:16:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A space gangster AU.  <i>Stacker Pentecost doesn’t want his girl growing up to be a Jaeger</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue Sky

**Author's Note:**

> This begins with underage prostitution and proceeds in a downward, grimdark, gritty direction from there. There are clones and androids and drug abuse and substantial deviations from canon and me just being like THIS WOULD BE HOT AND/OR COOL SO IT'S HAPPENING without any mental filter whatsoever. Like. Seriously. 
> 
> Not all pairings are tagged.
> 
> You're warned for everything and anything. If you are trying to filter out triggers, this is probably not the fic you want. If you want something with a plot and characters that stick closely to the movie, or a happy fluffy ending, this is probably not the fic you want.

1.

When Mako is fourteen, Stacker sends her to a boarding school on Titan for three reasons. First, Stacker doesn’t want her growing up to be a Jaeger. Second, Chuck Hansen, one eyeful of whom should be sufficient for any parent of a fourteen year old girl, let alone a parent with clear, unvarnished information about exactly what Chuck got up to in his spare time. In Stacker’s case, though, that reason still fits under the general heading of _Stacker Pentecost doesn’t want his girl growing up to be a Jaeger_. 

The third reason is this: a week and a half after Mako is gone, lifted off on a shuttle into the big gray sky, a night club at the corner of Fong and Tull favored by senior Kaiju power players turns into a forty foot column of flame. The Kaiju need a reminder that Stacker Pentecost is not a man to tolerate insult. Dozens disappear in the explosion. Hundreds more are hurt, and twelve hours later, the Kaiju retaliate by sending gun hands on hoversleds to strafe a casino in Jaeger territory with plasma bolts and rockets until it is reduced to rubble. 

The streets of the Boneslum orbital run Kaiju blue and Jaeger red for months.

Mako gets news of events days and days later, filtered through the ban on media receiving devices at the boarding school. She catches the news while passing by the teacher’s lounge on the way back from the bathroom, and she hangs outside the door, pretending to tie her shoe, until the news break is over and the set turns back to the reality competition show that the teachers are watching. Then, Mako goes back to the library, where the big glass windows show green grass and trees under Titan's curving, light purple sky. She makes sure that her letters home are always full of news on deportment class and field trips to art museums and the books she is reading.

Also: she bribes one of the men who works in the canteen with cash to bring her a media receiver set. When she needs replacement batteries, she uses her body. 

2.

The Russians can get you anything. 

3\. 

When Raleigh is nine years old, Yancy kills a man for him. In the Boneslum, these things happen from time to time, even if usually reversed in age: the man starts hitting the kid, and the man doesn’t stop. The kid is the one who almost ends up dying, and that is how it starts out, but the Becket boys are tough. Angry. They were born on Elara, traveled on the freighter services, but came to the Boneslum early and hard enough for it to remake them. 

Violence and age are not the complicating factor. The complicating factor is that Ma is a girl at a Jaeger brothel. Raleigh runs errands for tips, and a guy shows up. His favorite girl was booked, and he gets tired of waiting and Raleigh crosses his line of sight at the wrong moment. A beating ensues, and then it becomes — something else. Raleigh takes the beating quietly, with resignation, but starts screaming at the something else. Yancy comes charging in. The story would have ended with them being beaten badly and put on the street to starve except Yancy had been down in the kitchen peeling potatoes, and he brings a knife up with him. 

In that event: the story would have ended with Yancy dead and Raleigh sent down to one of the specialist houses, except Hercules Hansen happens to be visiting to put a little fear of Stacker Pentecost into mid-level management. Two kids, small enough. Bloody. Beaten to within an inch their lives, and the both of them have their hands tied behind his back. Which one gave the big door guard a bloody lip? 

"Clones?" Hansen asks. 

A pause.

"Brothers," the bigger one says, mouth full of blood. 

Then, he deliberately spits on the carpet, and this gets him a vicious kick to the ribs, It leaves him lying on his side, gasping and trying to rock back onto his knees, but also unable to: broken rib, possibly. Nobody helps him. Nobody moves, and the whimpering noises that he makes are the only sound in the room for a few moments. The smaller one turns his face up to look at Herc Hansen: his face is a mess of blood and bruising. What does Stacker Pentecost’s right-hand man care about a pair of brothel brats without the sense to stay in the background? 

Scott Hansen disappeared years and years back, but the memory of growing up young and hungry and completely alone except for his brother remains: Herc tells the Jaeger lieutenant to send the brothers down to the enforcers in the Alaska section of the Boneslum. The boys leave forty-five minutes later in a hovervan with their faces cleaned up, but their clothes still bloody. 

The Boneslum sky is always pearl gray. Neither of them so much as looks over their shoulders for either the mother or sister they leave behind. 

When Raleigh is eighteen and Yancy is twenty-one, they earn their Jaeger eagles. 

4.

The Wei-Tang triplets run every pleasure house in Jaeger territory. 

The Beckets aren't clones; the Wei-Tangs are, and they don't care who knows it. 

5\. 

Raleigh's transport is full of small trash and petty criminals. Some of them are from another cell block, so they don't know him and try to make conversation: by the time the shuttle docks, they know better. Most of them figure out, too, that the woman at the receiving area standing by the glossy-black custom hoverbike isn't waiting for them. A couple of them try anyways, but she ignores them and makes it clear without words that she is watching and waiting for Raleigh. Black jacket, black hoverbike pants and boots, matching helmet under her arm and another on the back of the bike, presumably for him, if he gets on with her. No weapons or significant modification as far as Raleigh can see. Black hair cut sharp around the face, but there are two streaks of Kaiju blue framing her jaw. 

"Mr. Becket," she says. She has an accent that isn't Standard Boneslum, and Raleigh stays a good fifteen feet away. 

She sees his hesitation, and moving slowly, telegraphing each movement, she undoes the buttons on the sleeves of her black riding jacket. First the left, then the right. She holds her forearms out, wrist-up at him. There are matching black eagles running from wrist to elbow on each arm, wide enough that they wrap around the edges of her forearms. 

The linework is clean and fine, and the proportions are right. Raleigh takes a wrist in each hand, and turns her forearms from left to right, angling them, making sure the rainbow bands of polarized light match on the left and right. Then, he lets go of her wrists and holds his right hand up, index finger out. She keeps both forearms up, so he does the right arm, then the left. She watches. Up, over the curve of each wing, then down along the inside edge, then into the black of the main body to check the continuity of the microink circuitry that should be underneath. When he touches his finger to the star above the eagle's head, Raleigh feels the faint hum of a live uplink port, sees the corresponding dilation of her right pupil when he touches the right star, the dilation of the left pupil when he touches the left star.

So despite the hair, despite everything else: real, actual Jaeger eagles. 

Raleigh steps back, and she does up the buttons of her sleeves. 

"You're not what I expected," he says. 

"Better? Or worse?" she says, smiling a little. She hands him the spare helmet, which Raleigh takes and gives her the knapsack in return. She straps that to the bike with neat, practiced motions, distributing the weight and making sure it'll secure. A courier, Raleigh thinks? Too smart. Too confident. Much too pretty. When Raleigh climbs onto the hoverbike behind her and puts his arms around her waist, he realizes that that her jacket is real leather, brought all the way from Titan. He's heard about real leather, but never actually seen or smelled or been this close to it. 

"Hold on," she says and kicks the engine to life. 

This is how Raleigh Becket meets Mako Mori. 

6.

Caitlin Lightcap discovered Drift. Newton Gesizler, who works for Hannibal Chau, knows a thing or two about the compounding and manufacture of it. 

7\. 

What does a boy like Raleigh Becket know about the finer things in life? Mako shows him around the Jaeger complex, and he gets a sense of the new circles that he's moving in when he sees the Wei-Tangs, the Kaidanovskys. Hercules Hansen, who, surprisingly enough, remembers the Beckets from the floor of a now-dead lieutenant's office: he tells Raleigh with a firm hand-clasp, that he is sorry to hear about Yancy. 

Mako shows him the personal areas, too, the koi pond, the stone garden. Raleigh runs his hands, carefully, over what he assumes to be artificial plants: he is startled when he presses a leaf between his hands and feels sap. Real, living plants, an entire courtyard of them.

"They're from the Homeworld. We have to use special lights to keep them alive," Mako says. 

8\. 

"I didn't know things were that bad." 

Raleigh Becket is talking about the number of Jaeger suits left in the bays, the number of Jaeger soldiers he sees around the compound, but he could also mean --  
9\. 

Mako takes him down to the sparring chamber, and Raleigh touches the fighting stick carefully, cautiously. He's never had one in his hands before, and when she tells him to take off his shoes and step onto the sparring mat with her, Raleigh manages one touch to Mako's right shoulder before she gets serious and pins him in between one breath and the next, though not before striking him in the ribs three or four times, hard enough to make it hurt. 

She straddles him, and pulls out a strip of Drift. Raleigh has a vague idea of what the picture looks like: Mako is not even breathing fast. Raleigh is on his back. His ribs hurt, and his chest hurts. 

"Your father," Raleigh says, panting. 

Mako smiles. "He wanted you here." 

As much as he can while lying on his back, with a beautiful, powerful woman straddling his bruises and holding a strip of Drift, Raleigh tries to indicate to the northwest corner of the Kwoon. 

"Hansen," he manages.

"I can handle him." 

Mako Mori holds the strip, and slowly, deliberately, holding the between two fingers, licks up one of her fingers, licks across the strip, then down the other finger. Her fingers gleam in the light, and Raleigh moans when he sees the sheet go crystal clear in the time it takes his pounding heart to beat twice. The faster the turn, the purer the product, and Raleigh Becket grew up in the Boneslum. He never smelled real leather or touched a living plant; he hasn't done Drift this pure in years, and delicately, carefully, Mako slides the strip into Raleigh's mouth. She keeps it on his tongue; she puts her fingers in his mouth, all the way up to the palm, to keep him from swallowing too fast. 

When Raleigh closes his eyes and breathes out, Mako leans down, kisses some of Drift off his tongue. He starts to slide his hands up her tank top, but Mako grips his left wrist. "Not yet," she says. 

Chuck Hansen steps out of the northwest corner. 

8\. 

The Wei-Tangs have Drift in strip and powder and liquid and gel in their pleasure houses, and the Russians can get you anything. Caitlin Lightcap discovered Drift, but Hannibal Chau is the prime supplier and mover. 

"Do not trust him," Stacker Pentecost says, gasping. His fingertips are blue, and he is frequently short of breath: nosebleeds are the least of it. He is dying of radiation sickness from the first generation of Jaeger suits. 

9\. 

Raleigh is Drifting with Mako, and her skill flows through him. He and Hansen aren't using fighting sticks, though when Raleigh thinks of the word, the sense-impression springs to mind -- the weight, the feel of it in his hands, the noise it makes against skin. When Chuck Hansen swings, Raleigh meets it with an open palm block that shifts to a joint-lock of the forearm. Chuck snarls, shifts his weight to try to break the hold, but Raleigh is anticipating it. He swings his right leg around, hooks his foot under Hansen's calf, and uses the momentum of their falling bodies to pin Chuck's arm flat against the ground, wrist twisted painfully. Chuck makes a noise between a shout and a scream. 

"Let go," Mako says and touches Raleigh's back. 

Raleigh looks up, sees her face through the haze of Drift, and lets go. 

Hansen staggers up to his knees: Mako is standing. Hansen is kneeling. Raleigh is sitting on his ass. 

"Shirt," Mako says up over his head, and Raleigh knows, from the tone of her voice, it isn't meant for him. Wordlessly, face almost blank, Chuck takes off his jacket, then the shirt he had been wearing -- his Jaeger eagle is on his back and huge, the biggest Raleigh has ever seen. On top, the tips of the wings curve over his shoulders onto his collar bones and the star is on the back of his neck, and the bottom of the wings disappears down past his belt. 

"You didn't win," Mako says, and Raleigh sees Chuck struggle with himself. Chuck opens his mouth to say something, but doesn't actually manage any words before Mako puts two fingers under his chin -- she turns his face up to her, and Raleigh sees how the blank look slides straight off Chuck's face when he looks at Mako. Anger, lust, shame in quick succession. Then more anger, more lust, and something else that Raleigh doesn't know if he wants to put a name to. Chuck doesn't look away until she takes her fingers away. When he does, his face goes blank again, but he undoes his belt and pushes his trousers down and off. No underwear, dick more than half-hard, and his thighs are slick with lubricant, with something thick already inserted to keep him wide and ready. 

Mako takes another strip of Drift out from her pocket. She holds it out; Chuck licks it, and she lays it against the Jaeger eagle on her left arm. Chuck applies his tongue again, and doesn't have to be told not to swallow. He keeps it on his tongue, mouth open to show Mako, who touches him on the shoulder and turns him around.

"Share," Mako says, and Chuck turns around all the way around, on his knees. Raleigh looks up at Mako, still standing, still smiling, her hand on Chuck's shoulder where one of the eagle wings crosses over. 

Raleigh kisses Chuck. 

Mako holds Chuck's wrists to the floor. 

10.

Jaegers use Drift for things besides sex. Raleigh was Drifting with Yancy when they went up against Knifehead. Disputed territory, heavy armament, Drifting Jaegers fine-tuned to each other's every movement and gambit, but outmatched by even heavier armament: Raleigh is able to wipe Knifehead out solo, but a Kaiju-aligned police squad finds Raleigh kneeling in the street, desperately trying to revive a brother who was missing the right side of his body. 

A Kaiju-aligned judge sent him to the prison orbital for killing his brother. The enforcement action had been unauthorized, but Herc Hansen convinces Stacker to call in a few favors to keep Raleigh safe. 

11.

Tendo, an old friend from the enforcer days, tells Raleigh how Mako got her eagles and brought the Wei-Tangs into the Jaeger fold in one blow: the Wei-Tangs were in a bad way three years back. They'd fought their way out of the brothels and into the gladiator pits, so they had the knowhow and the skill for their business, but were being ground to nothing between the Kaiju and the Jaegers. They were in serious negotiations to come under Jaeger protection, but wanted proof of Jaeger commitment to them: a Kaiju engineered virus was sweeping their pleasure houses, so Stacker Pentecost's own adopted daughter went undercover into a Kaiju brothel for eight months. 

Eight _months_. Two weeks in, Mako sends out the cure; three months later, she delivers a mathematical genius with intimate knowledge of the Kaiju organization on multiple levels. Gottlieb worked for the Jaegers now, and the Jaegers had fresh intelligence from the inside. They were winning. They got good at it, and then -- they lost contact with Mako. They thought she was permanently gone, and Stacker Pentecost was beside himself as much as anybody had ever seen him. Eight months after the fact, Mako walked out, leaving half the Kaiju pleasure house in smoking ruins behind her due to simultaneous explosions that trail greasy smoke into the sky for days. Mako got her eagles; the Wei-Tangs came over permanently.

"We wouldn't have survived this long without them," Tendo says. "Hansen is doing what he can, but -- " 

Stacker is sick; Mako's grief runs through the Drift in a clear blue thread, and the streaks in her hair are a souvenir from her days working in the Kaiju brothel. Tendo explains that they're programmed in at a gene-deep level. 

The Kaiju brand top-shelf product in a way that does not diminish resale value. 

12\. 

Jaeger suits are a fusion of human and weapon; the Kaiju took a different approach to weaponization. Standing in the Shatterdome bay, preparing for a final assault on the Breach by every remaining Jaeger with battle experience except for Herc, with Stacker Pentecost on his deathbed, Chuck brings out a full sheet of Drift, the size of his palm. He and Raleigh stand, facing each other, and take turns tearing a square off, licking it to activate, and then putting it in their mouths. They take turns tearing, and they take turns kissing. 

13\. 

The Kaidanovskys fall, burned by acid and covered in flame from throwers they did not know were there. 

The Wei-Tangs are destroyed by a three-armed Kaiju the size of a city block, as fast and canny as them. 

Standing alone, in Stacker's bedroom with the vase of fresh flowers and the pictures of Luna and Tamsin, the picture of her, all turned so that Stacker can see them while seated, with the bedside comm transmitter broadcasting just how badly the fight at the Breach is going, Mako Mori pulls a engram chip from the unit by Stacker's head. She puts it away in a secure inside pocket. Then, she dials up the anesthetic on the medication dispensing unit: it beeps to warn her that she is exceeding levels, and she confirms that yes, she knows the dosage _exceeds levels necessary for pain management_. She adjusts it again, and when it asks for the override this time, she has to provide her voiceprint and fingerprint before it'll authorize the dose. 

She waits a few minutes, then closes Stacker's eyes for him. She kisses him on the cheek and switches off the comm transmitter. 

After that, Mako moves quickly. 

14\. 

Mako remembers being ten years old, terrified, listening to the Kaiju murder her parents. Mako remembers Scott Hansen when she was eleven, on top of her, telling her this was the way to become a Jaeger: _put your legs around me and moan to show me that you like it_. She remembers Chuck walking in on them, skinny boy, with bright red hair that he grew out of and intense eyes that he never did. 

Mako remembers understanding why Stacker sent her to boarding school and still turning herself into a weapon, so that he couldn't do it again; Mako remembers her time with the Kaiju, every shred of herself hidden under a haze of drugs and mental conditioning, men and women and other and Kaiju-enhanced on top of her, inside her, under her, Drifting with what they thought she was, all in order to buy her _sensei_ another year of Jaeger survival. 

15\. 

"Mako, where have you been? We need to get Stacker and get out of here -- the Kaiju have breached the outside wall, and the internal generator has been compromised -- " 

Mako is ready, and she drives the blade into the side of his neck, all the way up to the hilt. She leaves it there, so that the blade will keep the blood from spraying, and Herc staggers. He was loyal to Stacker, even at the cost of his own brother, turning Scott over when the truth came out. Herc has always been kind to her, and Mako leans him against the wall. She closes his eyes for him, and she kisses him on the cheek and puts her leather coat on him, so that he'll stay warm until he dies. 

Then, she moves past him to the docking door. 

16\. 

//self-destruct brothers self-destruct pain fear heat self-destruct Yancy father chose me over mother father chose the Jaegers over Uncle Scott the prison orbital Mako coming back from Titan Mako coming home from the Kaiju self-destruct we've lost the battle we've lost the Boneslum we have to self-destruct so much pain// 

Drift is a drug, and it dissolves in flame and Jaeger thermite. 

17.

// -- enc . sum transfer confirmed 3.800.000.000 other funds sufficient approach citizen //

18.

What do bamboo and real leather and artificial yellow sunlight mean to the banker-rulers of the Homeworld? Stacker Pentecost has enough money to send Mako to a boarding school on Titan, but buying citizenship for her on the Homeworld is beyond his ability: it isn't beyond Mako's. Hannibal Chau wanted the Boneslum cleared of competition, very, very badly. On the shuttle, once they've left orbit and are safely in subsapce and locked on with course and the landing confirmed and paid for, Mako inserts the personality engram chip into the android's head. There is a whir and a long, long moment. Mako knows her hands are clenched into fists. 

Then, Stacker looks back at her out of the android's face. Then, it's Stacker's smile with an android's mouth. 

The Mori's built the most realistic, most human androids in the known galaxy. The gift did not die with Mako's birth father. 

19.

Alternatively weeping and laughing in happiness, Mako puts her arms around Stacker. He settles his right arm around her, and they sit together in the bunk. She tells him that she is sorry about Herc, but he tells her that he understands. He touches the streaks in her hair, and they sit in silence for a while. Then, Mako starts to cry again, a good bit for Herc, a little for Raleigh, some for Chuck. Mostly for the person who she has had to become. 

Stacker didn't want his daughter growing up to be a Jaeger. 

20.

On the Homeworld, Stacker tells Mako, gently, they'll say the streaks in your hair are sky blue.

**Author's Note:**

> LISTEN I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS EITHER I WROTE SIX THOUSAND PLUS WORDS OF CANON-COMPLIANT HOT DADS I NEEDED A SAFETY VALVE
> 
> A lot of this came out of chat with [ferricent](http://ferricent.tumblr.com/), who came up with the line where Mako tells Chuck to SHARE I CAN'T EVEN. And [destro](http://destronomics.tumblr.com/) suggested Mako going undercover, albeit in another situation. Raleigh's chest-tattoo is something [harrietvane](http://harrietvane.tumblr.com/) brought up long ago in yet another context.


End file.
